Continuation of our interview of Dr. Jack Taylor (see previous posting here).
JDH - I’m starting to approach cadences as optional elements. Drop them out, start with the Urlar theme notes, and bring them back in for shaping: see what interpretive insights you can bring by holding the E or not holding the E, or with a 3 or 4 note cadence, or just a 2 note cadence.
What does that do the to song? That exploration has been the most fun, really.
And of all the movements we have in bagpipe music, that cadence is the most expressive. You can’t think of another movement that is so expressive. Maybe a double-beat, if you play it like an echo, comes close; but even that is formulaic now.
JT - I do think you are right with that. And, of course, these expressive elements, like the cadence especially (the “introductory note” as it is better called) is just because we have this continuous sounding instrument. And we’ve got to do something.
Yeah, I mean, you’re right. And I’ve been very stimulated by what you’ve written. It’s great.
And I had wee go at “Too Long In This Condition”, you know. And I thought I’d try and play it like it was written in the original manuscript. But I didn’t have it, so I just played it as I remembered. And I found cadences were coming in and out, just sort of, kind of at random. And it was quite nice, you know. And, yeah: I do believe we should do that.
JDH - Remind me: MacFarlane’s Gathering is another version of Too Long In This Condition, more or less, right? It strikes me that putting them side by side, it is the perfect example of capturing a living tradition in flux, where one trajectory went this way, and another went that way.
It’s a lovely example of how these ancient musicians took a tune and riffed on it. And it went its ways, historically and geographically.
JT - They could have done that, for certain.
JDH - I’m seeing similar examples, running into it while exploring the tune “Are We Merrymaking?” / Birth of Rory Mor MacLeod / McLeod’s Dog Short Tail. (PS 131), and in comparing the MacKay with the Donald MacDonald’s version. Jori and I always wrestle when we encounter new manuscripts: I will play what is written, and Jori will tell me it isn’t idiomatic. Which is often quite true. Donald MacDonald writes this particular tune quite squarely. It doesn’t really sound the way we have grown accustomed to pibrochs sounding. And I was thinking about this, how to reconcile what we see written with what is expected.
But then I picked up the MacKay version and played it and realized that it has more of the idiomatic qualities Jori is looking for.
And that’s when it hit me: historically, there’s been a reduction in the diversity of playing styles, pulling slowly towards that inspired by Angus MacKay.
And what we see in the Donald MacDonald, Hannay-MacAuslan and Peter Reid manuscripts is evidence of clearly different interpretive styles. Not monolithic: Donald MacDonald shows an interesting variety of styles and movements. Nevertheless, these manuscripts quite often reflect settings of tunes that are quite distinctive from Angus MacKay and unfamiliar to our “idiomatic” expectations today.
JT - The reservation I have: [let’s take the taorluath gear in Donald MacDonald’s — Donald Gruamach as an example] with that particular thing, when you have a series of eighth notes (I call them quavers) in tripling variation - was that the scribe simply sketching it out and not completing it? Do we have evidence about that? Because there are lots of examples (take a look at Angus MacKay’s manuscripts) like that: you see a crunluath fosgailte and it’s just written even notes, but it probably wasn’t intended to be even; he just hadn’t finished it.
JDH - That’s a very good point. But it also allows for an opportunity for us to say, “Well, let’s try it this way and see how it sounds”, or “Let’s try it this other way and see how it sounds.” Because if the notational system seems to be ambiguous to us, then it becomes up to us to disambiguate it, to make a choice and see if it fits with everything else we are doing in that tune.
On the other hand, I stumbled across something in Young George’s Salute where the same tripling variation is there, but for this: there’s a point in that variation where the notes go G-A-A-B. How can you possibly play the triplet style with those notes? Now, Angus MacKay has a triple Low-G at that point, beginning with a dotted quaver to a semi quaver on the first beat.
So, this suggests to me that something other than tripling is possibly meant here in the Donald MacDonald score. As does Peter Reid, for that matter.
JT - You can look, and this is much more modern than the manuscripts you are looking at, at the John Smith manuscripts I just uploaded onto the Piobaireachd Society website and he’s an interesting character. He was around about 1850-1870, same time as Sandy Cameron and his father would have been a contemporary of Donald Cameron, you know? And he writes…I don’t think he would have had access to the Donald Macdonald manuscripts, I don’t think, because…well, he might have…I don’t know if it he did, because that got lost for a long time as you probably know…but, anyway, regarding these tripling variations, a lot of them he writes dot-cut-cut-dot, with that rhythm.
And, if you look at Joseph MacDonald, or Angus MacArthur, you know, it’s written in different ways there, too. But in the descriptive part it seems to say it was triplet. That was the rhythm that was meant.
Who knows?
JDH - It certainly makes one have to think. It makes it kind of fun, actually.
JT - Without a doubt.
Did pipers at the top of their game play “tripling” variations only one way? Given the number of pibrochs they kept in their heads - and the realities of making music in an elite, professional, notationless environment - some diversity in the rhythmic execution of the “tripling” is perhaps to be expected. Also, is it possible that two distinct variation types have collapsed into one?
I wonder if there was a wide spectrum of practice here, but am also sure that they were often sloppy with their notation, writing one thing when they meant another. There are many reasons why a notation might not be accurate, and I’d like to weigh up each transcriber’s work individually to home in on what might be going on. A conflict between what they wrote and what they played (or heard) might be because they didn’t finish the transcription, or their notational tools were blunt for the job, or they were inexpert at transcription (a highly-skilled business), or they didn’t feel the need to specify something a competent player would supply automatically, or they were making it more readable for customers (the pianists and violinists who bought music books), or they wanted to leave open something that they felt pipers should be at liberty to decide how to play. This list could be extended…
The notationless environment is an interesting one to take stock of. If something like the “tripling” was not conceived in staff notation - if it had never been seen on paper represented in one way - then a wider spectrum of rhythmic practice might be perceived as being the same thing. Staff notation makes us think in a way that is alien to how professional pipers thought before the mid-19th century. Anyone looking into the tripling should also consider the earliest notations of reels and strathspeys - here too we see rhythms that don’t tally with the categories of idiom we expect, and we have to recognise that what we define as a reel today doesn’t work for the 18th century, or for that matter for the first half of the 19th.
It is certainly fun to experiment, but I think each transcriber of bagpipe music needs to be treated as a unique individual, making different decisions for different reasons.
I assume that when I find in an author’s or a “family’s” oeuvre a notational capacity to indicate triplets (see PS 161 - H10: Too Long in This Condition), they would have indicated triplets when they heard them.
I guess my approach has been empirical, based on the assumption that these scribal notators were fully capable of capturing the key characteristics of the music being performed for them. While I am keenly aware of the vagaries of human transcription (take a look at biblical manuscripts - text critics have identified a significant number of “typical” mistakes that a manuscript author can make whether copying from another scroll or codex, or copying while listening to an orator reading from a manuscript), I cannot go so far as to believe a general order of sloppiness. “Noise” in the data, yes. Fundamental inaccuracy? As a rule, I reject such an assumption. These were people who understood music, who understood notation, and were dedicated to the prospect of capturing the music as they heard it. Was it hard? Yup. Could they capture everything? Nope. Did they get tired and make mistakes? Yup. All that is understandable.
But what notation does is give us an empirical glimpse into interpretive traditions and performances.
That said, these straight-fire quavers in the taorluath gear often reminds me notation I see written even today for reels, where the interpreter seems to be given the choice on whether and to what extent to point them. Perhaps the same can be said about Reid / MacDonald / “Hannay-MacAuslan” - not that they were sloppy, but were perhaps intentionally ambiguous.
Still, I feel like I’m entering into the realm of the speculative and would like empirical evidence (diaries, accounts, treatises) before feeling comfortable about embracing such a conclusion.
I struggle with your use of the word empirical here. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language gives:
1.a. Relying on or derived from observation or experiment: empirical results that supported the hypothesis.
1.b. Verifiable or provable by means of observation or experiment: empirical laws.
2. Guided by practical experience and not theory, especially in medicine.
I taught transcription for 7 years and was ceaselessly amazed by how, when you play the same excerpt to a class of transcribers, you get widely different results even from the highly-skilled students. They were always listening to exactly the same thing but almost never wrote it down the same way.
Therefore, I don’t see how a transcription is empirical in any sense. Rather, it is capricious, contingent on complex and mysterious things. People with excellent ears and notational skills are capable of writing down a triplet when the rhythm they heard was something else - and not realising it. This is particularly the case when they are skilled performers and have learnt to associate a particular idiom with a particular notation. It’s like skilled English speakers reading “rough” and pronouncing “ruff” - the notation doesn’t give an empirical glimpse of how the word sounds. Nor is it necessarily sloppy to write “rough” when you mean “ruff”! This analogy could be applied to several pibroch movements.
I would take care to avoid blanket statements, assessing each piece of evidence with a fresh mind. What is true for MacDonald’s transcriptions may not be true for Reid’s transcriptions, and what is true for one transcription may not be true for another in the same manuscript. We have an amazing amount of evidence and questions both unanswered and yet to be asked. To interrogate the notations with increasing awareness and understanding is one of the great joys of this field - they have a lot to reveal. It is like an insight into the human condition… nothing is straightforward or quite as it seems.
To my mind, we need to become more nuanced or mentally agile when reading these transcriptions, understanding and responding more sensitively to the ways in which they differ from each other and develop internally. To approach them as one lump, all in the same way, is a crude imposition of our own mental baggage regarding what notation is. Instead, lets accommodate their organic diversity and draw out as much information as possible from what’s there, questioning our assumptions.
By “empiricism” I am referring specifically to definition 1a - “Relying on or derived from observation or experiment.”
As a historian, I must rely first and foremost on the primary source evidence I am given. That is my foundation. I look at what I have. The more I assemble, the more I can begin to propose theories about how they came about, how reliable they are, how they relate to each other, and what their relations is to other sources I may have.
I may be able to draw from other theories from other fields, when they are germane to my study. Things like communication theory, media theory, textual criticism, music theory, ethnomusicology and folklore may help.
But to suggest that what we have is not what we see requires a great deal more foundation building before we can confidently assert such a statement.
I appreciate your anecdotal and personal experience with musical transcription in the 20-21st century. It certainly is suggestive that it is far more difficult than we may hope for or expect from transcription. Or, perhaps, more difficult than I seem to assume when stating that I take what I see on the page as the foundation for my exploration.
But what you have presented is just that: modern, personal and anecdotal. You may be able to site a whole lot of other literature to provide additional warrant for your assertions. That’s great. And the more such warrants are made available, the more we all can understand and judge them.
Until then, I start with my own disciplinary background of text, transmission criticisms and historical ethnology, look at the sources as they are presented and begin my comparisons.
And what I see are sources from transcribers with obviously deep ability and sensitivity. Whether they have captured all the nuances is immaterial - because we can never actually know. But what I see is variable, expressive and offers more musical options than what we have grown up with when all we could turn to was PS volumes 1-15 as our canonical literature.
Fundamentally, the differences between me and you lie in the approach we take to notation: you have stated that you believe the notational system was, by nature, a reduction of the living expression that it was trying to capture. That is an argument that many in oral cultures used to make about literacy.
I, on the other hand, see it differently: notational systems are the playground of interpretative possibilities. They may not capture the fullness of communicative expression - but that is impossible to do so. It is also an argumentative fallacy that they ought to do so: live performance is unique and impossible to recreate, no matter how sophisticated the recording medium (or combination of recording media) we may have available to us. But what notational systems do provide for us is a framework that is both reflective of original intention, and a foundation of interpretive possibilities.
I do not bemoan the loss of origins. I celebrate the evidence we have. And let it teach me.
As you describe it, David, I don’t see anything mutually exclusive between the two approaches. What alarms me is when you are interpreting the music as written and it is pointed out as not “idiomatic”. My knee-jerk reaction is a beligerent “who cares?”. It hints of a blurring line between idiomatic and dogmatic, which I think we should all agree has occurred in the past and must be avoided.
I am not sure I do either, and I share your alarm.
Esp. since the notational evidence suggests that the “idiom” was more expansive than what we are accustomed to playing and hearing today.
Looking at old Mss and seeing them as a playground of interpretive possibilities is, I think in the case of pibroch, best done from within the living, oral context of traditional piping. What would someone unfamiliar with that context make of these Mss? So, existing traditional styles of playing should also be seen as ’empirical’ evidence - which seems to be a common ground between these viewpoints.
To make an analogy, consider the debate about how velociraptors looked - did the films of Jurassic Park take unwarranted liberties? Some empirical evidence suggests they may have been feathered, and rather smaller. If birds are descended from dinosaurs, might not the Cassowary or the Eagle have Raptor-like qualities? These might be seen as parallel with the living tradition, whereas the cinema version is based on archaeological evidence, but with imaginative and dramatic considerations foremost.
I agree with Ronald about the value of archive recordings and the knowledge in oral transmission. As with written notation, nuanced thinking and agility is required when assessing what each piece of evidence might be telling us. Not all the evidence is equal in weight!
David wrote, “to suggest that what we have is not what we see requires a great deal more foundation building before we can confidently assert such a statement.” I fear it is the other way round - that you need to build a foundation to support your assumption that such different notations could be approached in the same way. I’d call for caution: for greater nuance handling each source, and for the realisation that we have been viewing these notations anachronistically - i.e. with post nineteenth-century minds - imagining things, projecting an order and a consistency, that simply aren’t there.
How can we become better at viewing them from an 18th-century Scottish Gaelic perspective? This is where inter-disciplinary collaboration helps. For example, the random spellings in transcriptions of Gaelic poetry: what do they tell us that might be relevant?
Ronald -
Let’s be clear - statements such as “best done from within the living, oral context of traditional piping”, are not only replete with thick language to unpack, they are also reflective of a very conservative approach, and are, in fact, a value judgement.
Now, before everyone gets dismissive and jumps to the conclusion that I’m advocating a context-less, radical approach to pibroch, all I’m saying is we should be willing to question each of these terms:
“living” - I suspect you mean “now” or “today”, but what if I am suggesting is that the manuscripts provide insights and evidence that what we are playing “now” as “traditional piping” could be questioned. They show evidence of something much different happening “back then”.
“oral” - I do not discount the value of oral transmission, but I also do not wish to canonize it. Oral traditions are both conservative in nature, and extraordinarily inaccurate over time: human memory is quite fallible, even among those whose function in oral cultures is to retain cherished and sacred tradition.
I also want to point out that “literary” sources should not be either easily dismissed or casually thought of as deadening. Hundreds of years of living in the Gutenberg Galaxy shows us the remarkable creativity inherent within the literary medium.
“traditional” - this is a term that I am questioning outright. “Traditionalism” is an ideology, a small-group reinforcement process seeking to legitimize a particular approach. Typically, “traditionalism” is a rhetorical means of stifling dissent and lionizing what for far too often is not ancient, but rather quite recent in memory and history. It is what causes dissent, as controversies erupt between schools of performance, and even within schools of performance, regarding what constitutes the “truly” “traditional” style of playing. To my mind, “traditionalism” is fundamentally disrespectful of the art form by chastening, not enlivening it.
Look, all I am suggesting is that these manuscripts do, in fact, provide us valuable insight into general principles of pibroch performance that we can all learn from:
1) the idiom was quite broad - in tempo, in style, in movements, in expression
2) exploring these manuscripts is an important pedagogical tool for any and every performer of pibroch, as it opens up interpretive possibilities from within the very history of the art form (one doesn’t need to import from anachronistic styles or idioms)
3) there is usually more than one way to play any particular tune - and you can find them all easily, download them, learn their differences and respect their differences
4) you do not need to import today’s “traditionalist” styles to make these older pibroch sound good; they can be played from within the notational evidence presented and sound good - different, but good (see point 1, above)
5) there is no reason on earth why any performer shouldn’t choose to pick up any of these manuscripts and play them in competition - they are musical, they are demanding, they come from the history of pibroch itself.
All of this is possible when we take them seriously, taking them at face value, and attempting to learn from them, rather than anachronistically attempting to make them conform to what we want and expect them to sound like based on our comparatively recent “living, oral context of traditional piping”.
I want to respect them, and our art form, by letting them teach me something.
I think words will not bear fruit - we need audio and specific examples to take this discussion forward. We’ll get nowhere generalising! I’m increasingly coming round to the idea that diversity was at the heart of pibroch and I fundamentally agree with David that it is experimentation, respecting the notations, that will reap the richest harvest.